22 March 2026. I landed in Jakarta from Bali, back in a 36m2 apartment, a little space I have called a sanctuary since the end of 2021, where I live with the two sweetest cats there are.

Counterintuitive to Bali's life, I pulled out a dusty prayer mat and garments that hadn't been washed for almost a year. You'd say gross. But, it was simply because I hadn't really been using them. My heart was sick, it was so sick that I could feel it throughout my entire body. I just wanted to dissipate and never face another day again. And, I asked God for one last time 'why do I need to feel what I am feeling right now?' 'why life is so unjust to me?'

I couldn't show my fractured heart because I was supposed to be the mature one, the one who held it all together, while internally I was eroding away.

I asked myself 'why do I feel like I am fading away?'

Like what I did didn't matter. Like parts of me could no longer coexist in a world where you have to be laser-focused on one goal and one identity. A world where authenticity means having successfully defined who you are.

I am a math freak, a nerd, in paradox I feel deeply, I am a poet and a dancer. A stronghold of soft water. And at the core of it, I am holding on to my faith, which talks a lot about sincerity.

I didn't know how to hold everything together. Can I build every pillar that makes me, in public, all at once?

It all became too much. I was forcing it, I was panicking, why did it have to be this hard? I started reading and listening to advice from the world's most successful entrepreneurs. Nothing touched anymore.

Another question then started building inside of me 'what if, instead of building, before everything I am trying to build falls on me, I intentionally raze them all?'

'What if, it's not about building them all equally, but stacking them one after another?'

This site has been pending for years because of all of this. The fact that I was no longer able to define who I am. I didn't know how to live without one part of me offending the others. How do I write without contradicting myself?

And finally, after months of sleeping on the floor and crying myself to sleep, I let every part of me collapse. I let them reconcile themselves.

I stopped being scared of myself. I decided that my writing will be uncomfortable for some people as it was in the past. But it is only when I am face to face with the most uncomfortable truth, the one that makes me want to run away, that anything moves. I understand that not everybody can take all of me. I have to hold all of me this time around, so I deliberately stop giving bits and pieces of who I am.

Because those questions that I had been avoiding were the ones keeping me stuck. I can't move on to the future while I am gripping on to the present.

How rotten this heart is if it isn't by God's mercy.

25 May 2026. I continued sleeping on the floor as prayers kept on slipping away. I restructured my life, audited it like my life depended on it.

Looking closely at what I was spending my time on. Who and what were actually important.

Looking inside my heart, at which part of me needed to receive and which needed to give.

Something came off first, the need to build every part of me, in public, all at once.

There is no word in English that can do justice to the word ikhlas. And how could anyone understand it without learning it and practising it?

If I hid behind trauma while everyone else had one too, aren't these the first obstacles I need to clear before I can really understand who I am? Making peace with them is the starting line, not the finish line.

Today, 22 August 2026, right before my birthday, after five months of dissecting who I was, I am stacking, one thing at a time. A legacy in writing. The numbers, the demolishing, the God underneath both. For whoever else has had to take everything apart just to find out what in it was real. No more hiding.

By God's grace, may these writings help some people.

All essays